Free The Rain in Spain by Amy Jo Cousins Page B

Javi was the one? She glanced at him, standing by the door, and wondered how she was supposed to find her way back.
    She thought about ignoring him. A full day of thinking and wandering and more thinking until her thinker was sore hadn’t brought her any closer to a conclusion. She could feel the edge of one in her brain, the jagged lip of an idea that frightened her, but the edge felt like a cliff and she held back from getting too close.
    The only reason she was here, on the rooftop, as opposed to at the Santa Justa train station buying one ticket to somewhere—anywhere—else, was because she’d said she loved him. But the instinct to bolt before he finally came to his senses and rejected her was strong. The wounded look in his eyes—the one she’d put there that morning when she’d stopped him at the door with a hand on his chest and told him to find his own way that day, without her—had followed her through the narrow streets and behind the thick walls of the Alcázar. Now, that hesitancy, the way he stayed close to the door instead of striding over to her little round table and grabbing the other chair, complaining all the while about how tiny the decoratively perforated metal seat felt under his ass, tugged at her.
    But she wasn’t ready to talk to him. Not yet. Hadn’t figured out any of the answers to the questions that had haunted her all day, through the mosaic-tiled archways and the extravagant, blooming gardens, next to the damp, still reflecting ponds of the underground water reserves, even the most functional of areas designed for beauty and symmetry to the eye.
    There had been a carefully-balanced opposition in her own thoughts.
    Magda with Javi means unhappiness.
    Magda without Javi means . . .
    She tucked her knees tighter under the table’s edge and rested her elbows on the white painted round, pressing her forearms together in front of her chest. Her thumbs lined up in front of her mouth like she was about to play at the children’s hand game. Here is the church, and here is the steeple. Open the doors . . . and see all the people! Not that they’d taken anything so traditional as the church route. Her side of the church would have echoed with empty pews, although surely her parents would have shown up? Two taciturn farmers to balance the scales against what she imagined as Javi’s large, happy family, even though she hadn’t met them yet. Her travel schedule made planning a trip to visit them a challenge, but she sometimes wondered if her husband didn’t know how to explain his strange wife to his more traditional family.
    Her own informal wedding announcement to her parents—an envelope of photographs of her and Javi at the government office where they’d married in India, and a note in which she’d briefly described the ceremony—had elicited a Hallmark card of congratulations and a thousand-dollar check she’d never cashed.
    “How’s the service up here?” Javi’s voice was low, rough. He put his hands in his pockets and shifted his weight from one side to the other.
    She’d wanted to come up to this rooftop bar and look at the city the first night they’d arrived in Sevilla, but Javi had made reservations at a Chinese restaurant that was the latest culinary obsession of the Sevillanos and he was so excited at the coup that she didn’t have the heart to insist. They’d passed smoky, open-front cafes with legs of cured ham hanging from the ceiling over the bar and she’d wished for tapas, hunks of queso manchego , and bowls of briny Mazanillas aceitunas , but had eaten lotus root and crispy duck.
    It had been, of course, delicious, though she chafed at his insistence on planning every meal. Every moment.
    “Slow.” It was a question you could ask your new wife—twelve months had passed in a handful of breaths, it seemed. Or a total stranger. She wasn’t ready to be a wife again today. Would he understand what she wanted if she hinted? “But there are plenty of